For roughly four years straight, you could count on one thing. A Saw movie would come out in October and make serious money. From 2005 until 2008, every Saw movie from Saw II to Saw V opened with $30 million or greater in its first weekend. That string of remarkable success has been broken.

Not only did Saw VI come in second to a movie that's been out in theaters for over a month (see this weekend's box office report), it's also the worst debut for a Saw movie since the first Saw, which took in $18 million way back in 2004.

Saw VI limped to only $14 million. Part of that is inevitably due to the strong performance of Paranormal Activity, with its incredible buzz, but there's plenty of blame to go around starting squarely at the front doors of Lionsgate.

One thing you could always say about the Saw movies is that they were well promoted. Like them or not, they always had some of the best commercials. Even more important, their posters and lobby displays were always epic.

Remember the two severed fingers for Saw II that caused such controversy Lionsgate had to pull the posters? Remember Saw III and its three rotted teeth (or gaping toothless mouth) hanging by wire? Even Saw V's understated poster of someone wearing Jigsaw's face as a mask was creepy enough to be effective, but Saw VI?

Damningly, Saw VI had the worst advertising campaign of any Saw movie thus far. From looking at the commercials, the only thing Saw VI had to offer was clips from Saw through Saw V. The movie was sold as a bloody greatest hits album of Jigsaw and company's greatest moments, with absolutely nothing included to remind people A) why they love Saw movies and B) why they should go out in the cold October night to see Saw VI rather than stay home and fire up the DVD player.

I saw Roger Corman on television once, talking about his theory of sequels. He had a chart, detailing the system by which he produced sequels to successful movies. In this case, Carnosaur. He had a chart with how much Carnosaur made, and how much Carnosaur cost to make. He was able to project this out to Carnosaur II and Carnosaur III, and determine via the law of diminishing returns just how many Carnosaur movies he could make off the profits from the first one before it became too much investment for too little return.

I think that Lionsgate's only film franchise is at the Carnosaur III end of the chart, and I think they know it. Lionsgate spent little money on promotion, little money on production, and very little money on casting. I didn't think it was possible to downgrade stars from Donnie Wahlberg, but ladies and gentlemen, the main player in Saw VI is some guy you've never heard of and the deputy from Picket Fences. Even the selling point of Saw movies, the Grand Guignol torture traps that made the series noteworthy, seem cheap.

The real problem isn't that Saw V took a beating from the critics, because every Saw has taken a beating from critics. The problem is that the torture porn genre that Saw helped launch is kind of over. Just like every other trendy type of horror film, Saw launched a thousand imitators.

In 2006, you had Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, and Turistas, all of which mined for the same blood-soaked dollars. Add in Wolf Creek, which came out in the last week of 2005, and it was a busy (and successful) year. In 2007, you had The Hills Have Eyes 2, Vacancy, Hostel II, The Hitcher, and Captivity.

That is an awful lot of human depravity in the span of two years; is it any wonder everyone's gotten burned out on slaughter and cruelty?

Saw VI is a movie we've seen before. Lionsgate made no attempt to even pretend otherwise. It is little wonder the movie feels like it's out of ideas when everyone has jumped on the Saw-style bandwagon and beaten the market to death!

While the movie has already turned a profit (the average budget of a Saw film is $10 million), the fact that it got beaten pretty handily suggests that the Halloween tradition is coming to an end. The torture porn genre is out of fashion now, so movie studios seem to be retreating to their comfort zone: remakes, reboots, and franchises. Enough money has been made for Saw VII, but Saw VIII is no longer guaranteed.

This might just have been a Paranormal Activity-related blip, but the numbers don't seem to add up to that. Every year since 2007 the torture genre has seen fewer and fewer movies, with only Saw VI, Last House On The Left (remake, so it doesn't really count), and The Collector hitting theaters. In two years time, there might not be any.